


Back and Forth

by butimnotdeadyet



Category: DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV)
Genre: Definantly qualifies as, F/M, Fix-It, Gen, Post Oculus, Sad, ish, may qualify as angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-17
Updated: 2017-07-17
Packaged: 2018-12-03 06:33:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,240
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11526558
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/butimnotdeadyet/pseuds/butimnotdeadyet
Summary: The Legends have Leonard back. Sara has Leonard back.But for how long?





	Back and Forth

**Author's Note:**

> I finally wrote something worth posting (finished, with a trackable plot) for the first time since November, holy crap.
> 
> dis: I don't own these lovelies, but if I did Wentworth would have a reoccurring role on every Arrowverse show
> 
> This, like a few of my fics, drops you straight into the thick of it:

“It was real?”

 

Six months. They had made it  _ six months _ .

 

He repeated the question. But she could tell he already knew the answer. 

 

Six months; and they had made it so much further than they had initially. He was here, with her.

 

Though he was likely regretting that now. 

 

They had been so careful. Gideon had both issued and maintained the gag order.

 

His face hadn’t regained any color. And his eyes still looked glazed. . . or watery. 

 

Mick had been so  _ happy  _ to have him back. So had she.

 

But his lips were pressed tightly together. And he shifted his weight, relaxed to defensive.

 

He was more accepting of her captaincy than he had been of Rip’s. Slightly.

 

He was pulling at the sheet around his bare waist like he was trying to hide behind it, beneath it.

 

She had been the most cautious; re-introducing him the all of the elements of their job slowly.

 

His eyes cut down to her scar-littered torso. Calculating the known truths and the fresh lies. 

 

One stupid phrase, in an attempt at consolation, and it was all down the drain. 

  
  


“Len-” a whisper as her mind whirled, catching up to her reality. She could pull this back. Feed him a line about overruling his command about Gideon leaving his dreams private. Claim ‘captain’s privilege’, cite obvious distress. Say that it wasn’t real, never was. That she misspoke - she was too sleepy, he was. Keep his mind from spiraling until the barrier cemented between the man he is and his prior memories was shattered beyond repair. 

 

But none of that would save  _ this, _ she knew. Nothing would allow them to continue on, falling together into a vortex of . . .  _ feelings  _ \- the kind they had each hesitated to embrace last time _.  _

 

(Sara wasn’t a fool. Nothing would keep her from him after being given a second chance.)

 

A sleep-fuzzy part of her mind insisted that she zip her hoodie shut over marks he had skimmed, wondering if refusal to acknowledge was a sound option. But the look on his face told her otherwise. She couldn’t do, say, or hide anything that would keep him sprawled in bed with her between mission like they had for the last four months. 

 

Or maybe she couldn’t save either. And judging by the way that his breathing was picking up and his flesh paled more by the moment, the last was most likely.

 

“I was right,” His voice was that pained sort of groan that it had been after catching Nate’s stray punch during the mission in Seoul. “Those dreams- they were too clear, too  _ real _ .” His eyes flashed up to her own. “It’s why my time in Iron Heights is so blurry. It’s fake. Planted”

 

“Len, no. It was just a nightm-” Her voice was stronger this time, matching his volume, but it didn’t matter when he spoke again.

 

“Then why did you know, Sara? How could you have guessed?” His tone was almost reproachful, like he wanted her to prove him wrong, show him that it really was a dream. “And you’ve done it before.” His right hand curled as he said it and she knew that she was made.

 

She had kissed each knuckle, sealed with assurances, when he had woken up in a cold sweat and stared at the hand like he could recognize it for the foreign appendage that it was. He hadn’t told her then, either. He didn’t need to. 

 

(It had been her first slip, weeks ago now, but it must have stuck in his mind, pulling at every thread and fray.)

 

She had tried to block his dreams after that, first as a suggestion to him - spouting nonsense about side effects for new recruits - then by seeing if Gideon could do it remotely. She had boarded up that avenue when the only possible solutions were spiking his dinners and neuron pulse dampening.

 

“I was right, this whole damn time.” He slid from the bed, graceful limbs almost losing footing in his hurry, his  _ need, _ to put distance between himself and the dreams, the bed, and Sara. The mask of vindication on his face did nothing to hide the fear, the betrayal. 

 

She couldn’t speak.

 

His undershirt was in place (it had taken so long for him to be  _ bare  _ with her, and she could see it fading now, in front of her) and his pants were hiked up over his legs and underwear before turning to face her again. “What happened to me?” His voice had dropped into old patterns, drawling out like it had during the Savage mission, like it had when they saved him from his own collapsing consciousness. “What is all of this? Why- why am I still here whe- when-” His breathing was speeding up, chopping his words and taking his skin from gray to red in a matter of moments before fading even faster.

 

Sara moved. Quiet and quick as ever.

 

She was beside him in the time that it took for his eyes to screw shut and another gasped, broken sentence to force its way out - “How am I  _ he-re? _ ” - and in another move, she collected his shuddering hands in one of her own and her free palm around his left arm, each a loose press against his skin. It was a good thing that she’s as small as she is, and he as large, or else her movements may have charged the situation more. 

 

She’d learned - this time around since they hadn’t had the chance in the last - that touch was invaluable to him, to  _ them _ . Grounding, in a way that she had forgotten. Or perhaps just not re-experienced after her own resurrection. She leaned into that now, stroking along his fingers as best she could with the limited maneuvering she was allowed with his larger hands wrapped in her own much smaller one while her right carved a path up and down his arm. His skin was too cool now, as it had gotten the other times he remembered. She needed him to calm down or they would be back where they were in the beginning. 

 

“Breathe. Slowly. You’re here. Len, you’re alive. With me and Mick and the Legends. But,” She shouldn’t, she knew. And she knew it would happen without her anyway. “The dreams aren’t dreams like you would have had back in Central, back home.” It was amazing they had made it as long as they had. Six months. 

 

She could practically hear the buzzing of Gideon’s speakers, wanting to ring out and warn Sara of her partner’s impending fallout. But, as ordered when Sara’s door was locked, they remained undisturbed. 

 

“They’re memories.” Barely audible, with Sara’s own pulse pounding in her ears. His eyes slit open as he said it to verify. He was too far, too smart, to walk it back now. “Of some time before, when I was here. . .”

 

“-Until you weren’t. You stayed behind at the Oculus. We left you. I did. And you were gone for over a year.” She was glad that his eyes had remained shut from as long as they had, it had made warding off her own her own tear ducts’ scorn less impossible. Now, she could only strengthen her resolve in knowing that he needed her, sound and solid.

 

“Then how?” 

 

They shouldn’t be having this conversation. Gideon was sure that their omissions were all that was keeping him upright. The block - or wall - or however the Oculus locked away his old experiences and replaced his months with them for jail time in his linear timeline will come down, suffocating him again. Like they had when they found him in the temporal zone.

 

“We don’t . . . we haven’t figured out for sure. As best as we can tell, the Wellspring’s destruction blasted you out into the time stream and you just - just stayed there.” His shoulders were shaking now, the tremors running down the length of his body, but his eyes seemed more clear than they had in the few minutes since his harsh waking. “Eventually, well, nothing’s supposed to  _ stay _ in any part of the zone for long, so, over a year after you were supposed to have died, we got readings of in-stream aberrations. We found you and brought you in.”

 

“But the memories. They didn't come from nowhere.” He was pleading with her, telling her to  _ make  _ it make sense. 

 

She hated that all she could give him was a shrug, he was right. It didn’t change the fact that as soon as he was introduced to motile time, his temporal lobe had been rewritten with a constructed narrative that his mind was more than willing to follow. Gideon had told them as much and, because the blueprint was synthetic (natural but without a source, discernible to her systems), was able to give them a basic outline from which Sara and Mick had built a plausible story. She told Leonard as much.

 

“So, what happens now? There has to be a reason my own brain was lying to me, so why?”

His voice had regained some strength, though it seemed it was mostly only because he was fighting over the stimuli of his own shaking. Nonetheless, he pressed when she hesitated in her answer, lip pulled between her teeth. “Sara, tell me.”

 

“You’re getting colder, Len.” She knew that he could tell, her hands would have to feel like heated iron against his skin at this point. His felt like the floor of the frozen engine room from so long ago. The crack in her voice went unnoticed.

 

His brow creased and his head shook for just a second, independently from the rest of his body. It took a moment for Sara to gather that the move was intentional, a dissent, confusion.

 

“What-t do you m-mean?”

 

“Len, your memories lied for a reason. Something inside you, your mind, can’t handle all of this. The dying but not being dead, the months adrift than living off a life that never happened. And now that you know, now that I’ve told you, you’re reverting to how it was when we found you.”

She kept her voice from cracking this time. 

 

“S-Sara, how-” 

 

He dropped like a stone. Saved from the ground only by her reflexes, eyes rolled back further than should be possible. She held him there for a moment, carrying his weight and feeling the last of the warmth leave him from her arm wound around his chest, before easing him onto the ground.

 

Sara called out as she adjusted herself to sit on the ground beside him, “Gideon?” 

 

“Captain Lance, you were warned-”

 

“I know, just tell me.” Her voice broke again. She should be better at this by now.

 

“Mr. Snart has regressed to the catatonic and thermo-inept state that he was found in upon removal from the temporal zone two years ago.”

 

“How long until we can land?” Her hand drifted through his hair, rubbing at the spot that would make him sigh if it had been any other night in the past few months.

 

“Approximately 2 hours, Captain.” There was a pause. Sara already knew what came next. “Captain, I must warn against using the time engine radiation-”

 

Sara nodded. She knew. But it was the only way to bring him back again.

 

They had made it so far this time.  _ Six months.  _

 

But she knows what the future has in store.

 

Mick will want someone to fight to distract himself again and Jax will need something to fix something to kill the time until the radiation can do its thing. Ray and Stein will probably scour the libraries across time and space in hopes that they’ll find a rhyme or reason to it  _ this _ time, like any other of the last seven have been different. Nate will pretend that nothing happened because he still can’t handle the fact that he even  _ likes  _ Leonard. Amaya will try to talk to Mick about it all, about Len, but will end up crying in the cargo hold like the last time he was actually around long enough for her to get close to.

 

Then, if all goes as planned, he’ll be up and around before any of them have had a chance to miss even the sound his disapproval. But be every bit as new to the ship, and the mission, and her as he was six months ago.

 

And Sara. She’ll plan mission and track aberrations and maybe be a good buttoned-up captain again after spending  _ so damn long _ running around like one half of a pair of lovestruck idiots. And she’ll build up her tolerance so that maybe the next time he’s conscious and smirking and hitting all of the nails on the head she won’t fall quite so hard.

 

But Sara sighs to herself as she checks the clock, still an hour or two early to justify calling one of the boys in to tell them that they’ve lost a friend again, knowing that it doesn’t matter. All of the preparation that she does. Because each time she will convince herself that he’s back and real, and there to stay and after a day or a month or a year she will fall for him anyway. 

 

Only to end up back here, sitting on the ground with tears soaking her face and Leonard as cold and as far away from her as he was before.

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> I have missed you all, my beautiful Cap Can family!
> 
> *if it's not clear, the time drive radiation basically thaws him out. reintroducing 'time', like 'heat', back into his system means that he reboots to the state that he was in upon retrieval from the TZ.
> 
>  
> 
> Comments and the like are always welcome and appreciated! 
> 
> Many thanks,  
> Gin


End file.
